Jimmy Wayne finishing Phoenix walk with broken foot

Click to see a gallery of photos from Jimmy Wayne's January sendoff for the 'Meet Me Halfway' campaign (this image: Tom Stanford/The Tennessean).

With just 10 miles left in his approximate 1,700-mile walk from Nashville to Phoenix, Jimmy Wayne found out today (Saturday, July 31) he had broken his foot.

“The doctor did an X-ray and it is unbelievable,” said the country singer who started the journey, dubbed Meet Me Halfway, on Jan. 1 to raise awareness of at-risk youth and teens in the foster care system. “My heel is broken in half. It’s certainly not the news I wanted to hear.”

Wayne thinks the break occurred about 50 miles back as he spent several days walking down steep mountainous terrain.

“I walked across everywhere but the mountains here are so steep,” he said. “I had to go about 5,000 feet down in three days. It’s so steep the truck drivers were going by so slow you could write your name on the side of the truck. I felt like something was wrong, but I didn’t know it was broke.”

Wayne, who has a vehicle following him, said he was determined to keep walking, but on Friday the pain was just too much. He developed a fever and said he literally “was down for the count.”

“I was laying on the sidewalk and people were just walking by staring at me,” he said.

When the doctor delivered the news of the break, the excruciating pain and fever made sense.

“He said it would take eight weeks to recover and that if it was an athlete it would have taken me down,” Wayne said. “I don’t know how I walked all those miles on the break. I guess it was adrenaline that kept me going.”

But Wayne, who was once homeless as a teen during his troubled youth, doesn’t plan to let the injury keep him from concluding his 7-month cross-country adventure on Sunday as planned. He’s walking the rest of the way in an air boot.

“It’s like something out of a movie,” he said of his latest obstacle. “This is the craziest journey of my life. This is just so hard to believe.”